I’ve been loving Cactus Software‘s simple, rapidly developed games, each one packaged with a neat conceptual hook and minimalist presentation. However, their new game, Minubeat, is too much for me. The concept this time is a shmup that you play to the beat of the music. You can move freely with the cursor keys, but you shoot to the beat. And, well, I can’t survive more than a few seconds. Maybe that’s the point, as Cactus explain:

The game is a rhythm shmup, you have to use bomb and defense in sync with the beat! Press Z to shoot normally. X for homing bombs, C to clear screen from bullets. You have one minute to beat the game, that’s how short it is. Will probably take you a while, though. Made in 12 hours.

Fire and Forget is similar, except its focus is on the music and, as a result, you get to keep playing until the song ends, regardless of the number of times you die. I very much enjoyed it, and I’ll have to check out Minubeat.

Minubeat is surprisingly addictive considering its difficulty. Once you actually get into the beat it becomes lots of fun, although until that point it is all trial and error. I still can’t finish the game within the timelimit though.

After you get used to it, the enemies get really easy. The only problem is that you need to speedrun through it all just to be able to beat the time limit. I kept wondering “why does my ship just blow up at the end?!”